In the world of sci-fi movie geekdom, August 29, 1997, was a turning point for humanity: On that day, according to the Terminator films, the network of US defence computers known as Skynet became self-aware - and soon launched an all-out genocidal war against Homo sapiens.
Fortunately, that date came and went with no such robo-apocalypse. But the 1990s did bring us the World Wide Web, which is now far larger and more "connected" than any nation's defence network. Could the internet "wake up"? And if so, what sorts of thoughts would it have? And would it be friend or foe?
Neuroscientist Christof Koch believes we may soon find out - indeed, the complexity of the web may have already surpassed that of the human brain. In his book Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, published earlier this year, he makes a rough calculation: Take the number of computers on the planet - several billion - and multiply by the number of transistors in each machine - hundreds of millions - and you get about a billion billion, written more elegantly as 10 to the 18th. That's a thousand times larger than the number of synapses in the human brain (about 10 to the 15th).
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/a-selfaware-internet-not-so-farfetched-20120924-26ah3.htmlp.s I read the article & then post it here
